1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to block based end-to-end data protection for extended count key data (ECKD) in a computing storage environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Data storage systems, or disk storage systems, are utilized to process and store data. A storage system may include one or more disk drives. In enterprise-class computing environments, data storage systems (or storage controllers) are often separated from the computer system, connected via a network (or storage network). The computer system that accesses such a data storage systems via the network is often called a server or a host.
In certain computing environments, data may be organized in ECKD (Extended Count Key Data) format. Data may be stored on volumes in a sequence of tracks, where each track contains one or multiple ECKD records. Each ECKD record consists of a fixed-length Count field, an optional, variable-length Key field, and a variable-length Data field. This ECKD format is also used when sending data from a server to a storage controller for the data to be written, or when data is sent from the storage controller to the server during a read operation. For the transfer between server and storage controller, the FICON or High Performance FICON (HPF) protocol may be used. Both are individual implementations of the Fibre Channel (FC) layer 4 protocol, as defined by the INCITS T11 committee, which is in charge of defining the Fibre Channel standards suite. Data entities defined by the ECKD protocol, which may be one or more ECKD records, individual fields of such records, or entire ECKD-format tracks, are transported between servers and storage controllers by means of the FICON or HPF protocol. FICON and HPF use the underlying Fibre Channel layers in the same way as other Fibre Channel protocols, such as the most widely used Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI (FCP).